My house is a two‑storey house with a small garden. In the garden there is a walnut tree that has witnessed my childhood; in the photo you can see me standing in front of it, with its pruned trunk behind me. This tree was planted by my mother, Sema Calgav, together with my aunts, her sisters, when I was a child. When the walnut tree grew and began to bear fruit for the first time, they would excitedly tell how, in their youth, they used to shake the tree to make the walnuts fall; sometimes, they said, they would climb onto its branches and rock them back and forth until the walnuts rained down to the ground.In those years, around 1975–76–77, turkeys were sold on the streets before New Year’s. My grandfather bought a turkey for New Year’s one of those years. Normally it would have been slaughtered for the New Year’s table, but we did not slaughter this one; I became attached to it and started to feed it. As the years passed, the turkey grew and grew; in my memory it turned into a huge animal weighing 50–60 kilos. We tied its leg with two clotheslines so that it would not run away. Even so, it would make such powerful upward moves that it could fly up as high as the walnut branches 20–30 metres above. Imagine a turkey of 50–55 kilos shooting almost straight up 20–30 metres. In those days we were children; in our eyes the turkey, the walnut tree and the four‑storey apartment building behind it all became gigantic.Over the years, the walnut tree never stopped growing taller. When it was younger, that is to say some 20–30, even 40 years ago, it rose higher than the four‑storey apartment building behind it. The building you see in the photo today used to stand in the shade of the walnut tree. Its branches would pass the level of the top floors, and as they swayed in the wind they would cast both shadow and a kind of murmur. I remember something breaking inside me when my mother, Sema Calgav, said, “It has grown too tall; we have to have it cut.” In the end, the upper part of the tree was cut, its trunk was pruned; but the walnut tree is still there in the garden, with its roots and its trunk.Today, as I hold my phone and take a picture with that pruned walnut tree behind me, my childhood comes back to me. The trunk you see in the photo is the same tree that gave us walnuts for years, that once grew higher than the four‑storey apartment behind it, and whose branches that big turkey — which I thought was “flying” — used to leap toward. The turkey lived for years without being slaughtered; I fed it, it grew, we grew up, the apartment stayed the same, but in time the walnut tree became too much and was cut back. Still, the trunk that stands in my garden today keeps within it my mother’s and my aunts’ youth, the New Year’s turkey my grandfather brought home from the street, and the astonishment of my own childhood.